Garbo! The unending saga of Hollywood’s most mysterious, misunderstood star

Friday

Mar 29, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Liz Smith

‘She was like a horse on the track. Nothing, and then the bell goes, and something happens,” said Hollywood cinematographer James Wong Howe about Greta Garbo.

If you’re like me, sometimes you roam your living quarters picking up and putting down books that have accumulated in piles, all of which you intend to read — someday. This happened when I discovered “Loving Garbo” by Hugo Vickers. I didn’t notice that it was first published in 1994 and had been waiting for me ever since. The subtitle is “The Story of Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton and Mercedes de Acosta.”

I knew perfectly well that the mythic Garbo had been rumored to be a long “off-and-on” lover of the somewhat effete Cecil Beaton, the English designer who won three Oscars and helped make “My Fair Lady” a hit. I knew she had also been an “off-and-on” early love of screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta. I felt there was nothing new for me in this tome and that’s why I had avoided it for so long. But when I began reading, I couldn’t stop. They were all here — the extravagant lovers and admirers of Garbo, who seemed to treat them — in the post-Hollywood years — with elaborate disregard, while claiming their attentions inevitably.

I was writing for the social Cholly Knickerbocker column back in the ’50s and ’60s, and Garbo was omnipresent in New York. So I was stunned at how many “players” mentioned in this book, I had known myself.

Garbo was finished with movies by the ’50s. Some of the famous back then were people I had merely been introduced to, others I came to know well. I started counting them up. In spite of my lowly ink-stained job and social status from the ’50s to the ’70s, I discovered 65 big names in this work on Garbo, people I had met or come to know.

I was interested to read about 450 E. 52nd Street, an important building where Garbo resided on one floor and her admirer, George Schlee, with his designer wife Valentina, resided on another. As Alexander Wolcott had also once lived on this important dead-end street overlooking the East River, it was dubbed by insiders as “Wit’s End.” And it was said later that when Schlee died in 1964, his wife, who was famous in her own right, had their apartment practically exorcized to rid itself of the Garbo aura. Valentina never spoke to Garbo again and they avoided using the elevator at the same time. But for years, the Schlees and Garbo had had some kind of threesome going. Nobody knew exactly what it meant. (If you know, please write and tell me!)